The David Boles Bells Blog.
Ring Them Boles Bells!
“Ring them bells
from the sanctuaries
’Cross the valleys
and streams”
Pressing Kettlebells Over the Age of 50!
The Get-Up at Sixty-One
Here is the climb as my body files it. I roll to the bell, lace both hands on the handle, and roll back with it hugged to my chest. My right arm presses the iron to lockout above the shoulder. Both eyes find the bell and keep it. My right knee bends until that foot stands flat. Out along the floor goes the left arm, an outrigger. Now the right foot drives, and the trunk rolls up onto the left elbow. From the elbow I climb to the flat left hand, and the sit grows tall. Hips rise next, a bridge from hand to heels. Under that bridge the left leg sweeps back and sets its knee where the hips had been. Then the hand leaves the floor. The torso swings upright, and I am kneeling in a lunge with the iron overhead. Toes turn behind me. The front heel takes the freight, and I stand all the way up into the ordinary miracle of vertical.
Pressing Over 60: The First Dispatch From the Far Side of the Door
I was fifty-five when I started this site, already half a decade past the threshold on the sign. Over 50 names a doorway. You walk through it once, on one particular birthday, and you remain on this side of it for the rest of your life. A sixty-one-year-old lives inside Over 50. So does a ninety-year-old. The category holds every one of us who crossed, which is why the sign can stay bolted to the wall while the man who bolted it there keeps aging underneath it. If I repainted the sign every time I earned a new decade, the site would become a diary, and you did not come here to watch a man count.
The Turkish Get-Up: Learning to Rise When Rising Gets Hard
Watch someone attempt their first get-up without instruction. They'll muscle through it, jerking and twisting, using momentum to cover for missing stability. They'll make it to standing, probably, but they'll look like they're fighting the ground rather than working with it. Now watch someone who's practiced for six months. The movement becomes almost ceremonial. Each position held, each transition earned, the bell tracking straight overhead like a plumb line measuring their integrity against gravity's indifference.
Problem with Timed Sets
I am not a fan of timed Kettlebell workout sets. Timed sets are when you set a countdown timer, or a countup timer, and you perform Swings, or Presses, or whatever — within a certain time frame before the clock runs out. Sometimes you move the bell for only a part of a minute. Other times you do as many reps as you can within a minute.